Review : BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Some friends asked me if I was going to see this. I said yes, even if it's crappy I want to see it. They replied with the same thought. Why? Because the idea of anyone taking on the personality of Freddie Mercury gets automatic kudos from anyone who grew up in the 70s and even if it's a series of great moments in history gaffer taped together it might be fun at least until the end credits rolled. So, how is it?

We begin with Freddy waking up in his London home, getting ready for the day while an audio montage from radio news plays. He steps out of his Rolls Royce and heads into a stadium. His band is announced and they just about take the stage for the Live Aid gig when we zoom back to the late '60s knowing that we'll end at Wembley. So it's a framed biopic of a rock star. It might make you cringe or relax and delight you depending on how it deals with the tale.

Note, I didn't say how it deals with the truth. Fiction rock bios that attempt the truth usually try shoving in a wedge of myth as well. So in addition to the crowded canvas of a timeline that leaves too little of the characters you can get a lot of hagiography (for which see Oliver Stone's The Doors or Alex Cox's execrable Sid and Nancy). But if you focus on the character and appropriate here and borrow there form the timeline in service of the character's story and you do it while remembering you are making a mainstream movie for the pleasure of a crowd you shouldn't go too far astray.

And the good news is that despite some howling anachronisms we really do emerge with a compelling story about an interesting person. A lot of this has to do with Ramy Malek, the intense protagonist of Robot Man, fitting into the wigs and prosthetic teeth of his subject with a clear skill at distracting us from them. He fills it up with high camp and the insecurities behind the camp adding tension to almost all the scenes he's in. It's this that brings to the level we want because it's nuanced and unsettling and, while we might want a rockstar in a movie to be an alphamonster, getting that depth from a handful of consistent performance tricks is pretty impressive. Also the rest of the band is well cast with actors who don't just look like their historical subjects (Gwilym Lee as Brian May is uncanny) but get enough filling out to let the drama mean something.

So, I'm talking about characters and drama rather than historical accuracy. That's because this film prefers the people to the timeline and less to exalt the rockstars than bring us closer to the exaltation through acquaintance with the daily void between peaks. It's not Ken Loach but it sure as hell isn't The Doors, either (Freddie had far more physical reason to go around catching sight of the grim reaper than the "torn" movie version of Jim Morrison).

Bohemian Rhapsody was the first song I heard by Queen. At the end of grade eight I stumbled on it on the local radio and was blown away, noting the back announced band name. And then it couldn't have been better as the first Countdown of the following year (I think it resumed in late January) lead with the video. I bought Night at the Opera a few months afterwards and was a confirmed fan. The music was strong and ranged from the thrilling gravity of Prophet's Song to the biting humour of Death on Two Legs. Everyone at school loved them too and between us we bought up the backlog which was all just as good. I went as far as Jazz but by then they'd worn off and had been eclipsed by punk. When I moved out of home I gave all the Queen albums to my delighted eldest brother who thought I was nuts to do so. I've replaced every single one since.

So, even if this movie had been a dud the attempt alone won me. The good thing is that it's much better. There are wincey "great moments in history" scenes but the worst of them is cleansed with genuine humour (and mercifully a lack of smarmy self-reflexivity, the characters themselves are allowed to be funny). If you like Queen there's plenty here to enjoy. Oddly enough if you only like the notion of rock music history rendered into fiction there's probably a little more. Also, perhaps more importantly, for such a dry-eyed movie goer I welled up more than once. Just don't expect history; there are documentaries for that sort of thing.

Review: SUSPIRIA 2018

A young woman barges in on her psychiatrist on a bleak Berlin day in the late '70s. He shifts an appointment with her and makes notes about her delusions as she acts erratically in his office. She tells him she fears for her life and the lives of her friends back at the dance academy because it's run by a coven of witches. Exit screen left and that's the last of her ... maybe.

Elsewhere, amid scenes of stret protest and news commentary about the Bader Meinhoff gang, young Susie Bannion gets off a train and makes her way to that academy. She makes a big impression at her audition. So much so that the chief instructor, Madame Blanc is psychically alerted to her performance and abandons the class she is taking to witness this new raw talent. She's in!

From this point we follow Susie's progress through favour and skill at the school while we learn of her childhood in a forbidding ascetic Christian group and the psychiatrist's back story that has to do with the war years. Also, just as the political strife is on the boil in the streets and the world's stage the witches at the school are heading for a leadership spill. Yes, this time around they are revealed as witches from the get go. There's a point to this and it forms the wedge between this and the original version of the story from the real 1970s. But I don't spoil movies.

I am well behind on the works of Luca Guadagnino but do know he has risen from arthouse fare that has divided audience to more generally celebrated films like Call me By Your Name and A Bigger Splash. I might well choose to catch up with those but it won't be on the strength of this one. Not that it's a bad film. It is very well crafted and above all deliberate in the choices that give us its muted '70s pallet, underplayed score and character arcs. Cinematic quality is not the issue here.

This might well have been, given its troubled pre-production history, a tawdry point-missing Americanised travesty. There are pointers to that but Guadagnino steers those elements away from the mainstream cliches they might have been in the hands of David Gordon Green (who went on to yet another unbidden remake, Halloween 2018). And there is much to be admired in the way Guadagnino blends the supernatural with the socio-political elements so that without too much hammering they feel as though they belong on the same screen.

He's no slouch with horror, either, in this remake of a horror milestone. The scene in which Susie's dance seems to twist and rupture the body of a character in another room is terrifying. It isn't played for the slightest laugh and is richer for it. Other excursions into unironic horror work as well for that same commitment. Tilda Swinton is at her most intimidatingly confident as Mme Blanc. Her counterpart, Susie, is given real range and nuance by Dakota Johnson. No one the large multinational cast disappoints. So why don't I like it?

The original film is not something I grew up with but I only had to see it once, on a crumbling rental VHS at the end of the '90s, to be completely captivated by it. Why? Yeah, why? The thing has no depth, it's plot is a scattered and unconvincing mystery and is played by a cast who mostly are mouthing their lines which are very obviously dubbed by the stilted delivery of voice-over talent who sound like they're paid by the day. There is backstory but it's left till late, is dull in delivery and jolts the viewer out of the world of the rest of the film. There's a stupid and needless scene with a bat that leaves a bad taste in the mouth by its suggestion of animal cruelty. So, why do I love it?

Well, because it packs a wallop with ultra-violent kill scenes from the off, in eye popping deco settings in a pallet intentionally torn between deep reds and blues from a choice to shoot it with expired film stock. Suspiria 1977 does not pretend to be anything other than a scarefest. The whispered detective work between some of the characters is enjoyable but there's only a tiny fraction of the work given to the plotting of Argento's earlier Giallo films. It's witches/bad vs Suzy/good with a barnstorming score that sounds like the best prog rock ever. I love it because it gives all this in 98 minutes.

The new Suspiria adds almost an hour of screen time spent setting up relationships and contexualising witches and then what always feels like too long on back stories. In the end this is only in the service of an overall twist in a single character arc. Is that really worth adding a two thirds of the original's screen time: you want us to be a little more understanding about witches?

Backstory incursions are (to be in theme) a curse to horror stories if they take more than the equivalent of a few lines of a prose tale. There are exceptions but only very few. Mostly they add drag as they do here. If you've seen Sleepaway Camp you might know of a very late insert along these lines but it adds with its brevity and weirdness (which helps the otherwise too-bizarre revelation). It was backstory that turned the tale in Ringu from a freezing weird revenge story into a big bloated character piece as The Ring. Backstory allows the viewer too much control over the narrative: the horror of the original depends on the viewer's lack of this. While Guadagnino does this better than that his efforts suggest a question that is not answered by seeing the result of his efforts. Why?

Guadagnino stated that he wanted this to be different in every way? Why? You get a few extra themes in there but these have nothing to do with the intentions of the original. Reclaim witchcraft as part of the feminist narrative? Lovely, but go and make something new. To be iconoclastic? Suspiria isn't E.T. or Gone With the Wind, it's a cult favourite, tiny in the timeline. Do you really need to punish its fans with a contemporary history re-jig? The problem of this version is not whether it's well made but why it should exist at all. The recent Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, similarly told a story that did little more than appropriate the branding for what turned out to be a rather anodyne purpose that used a lot of exhausted special effects.

The main fracture between the two films really stresses the question of why we needed this. That is the issue of control. The point of the scares in Suspiria is that they are not easily controllable by the viewer. It's hard to rationalise them beyond the great sense of menace they give and the cold-sweat violence that ensues. This is nightmare logic. You can feel terror at anything in a nightmare, an ice cream cone will do, the effect of terror is your powerlessness to best or escape it. The new one is all about characters vying for control (including the offscreen terrorists). The audience in this just needs to sit back and follow, feeling at no time under threat from the film itself. This removes the power of the original. Why? You change the arc, rename characters but put the red and blue of the original in the shading of the subtitle font? That's just insulting. There is no point to this film taking the title of the earlier one. It simply doesn't earn it.

I'd planned on ending with the pun: there oughta be a lore. But there is one. Want to try a remake about witches? Do a real one on the backstory of The Blair Witch Project. Not the good but irrelevant sequel and certainly not the assembly line recent remake but something about the character of the Blair Witch herself. Or, really, if you really want to remake Suspiria and have something like the impact of the original, go all out and make it as the first drafts by Daria Nicolodi had it with the characters of the dancers being children. That's right, six to nine year olds. Make that one. Then you've got some real horror and the institutional darkness thrown in.